Blogging for jewelers and metalsmiths made easy! (and for those interested in jewelry and gemstones)

thinking about things to put in my big backyard

by sheltech on July 7, 2010

Is this thing on? … testing… uno dos three four…

er… so it’s a blog , I can do what I want . it’s the world according to Dar; it’s my party and I can spell if I want to , capitalize it or not !. Capital idea , old chaps and chappettes , and young ones too ; it’s the wild west internet(s) show, where anything goes , so here we go again. alternate streams of consciousness flowing ; where do they come from and where do they go? . don’t ask me but here’s a little bit about what they’re doing now (now that I’ve escaped Facebook and other boards, it’s time to write about the real stuff, I imagine). It’s not about jewelry , so if you’re looking for that, look away now. It’s about thinking about some of the things that artists sometimes think of, and about finding something that you just have to do , something you couldn’t possibly not do. for years , I couldn’t possibly articulate my thoughts coherently; maybe because there weren’t many coherent thoughts to articulate, but that time has passed , and it’s a nice balance , doing, thinking, ariculating . I think, therefore I blog …

They’re (those alternate streams) sending me strange transmissions full of dangerous advice (and I reply “well thank you, God , but I think I’ll keep those thoughts on ice” , borrowing from my man Bill Nelson (no, not the senator!) . it’s a field of dreams out back ; dreamtime in the outback , if you will, and it wants me to build big things and put them there. Big metal sculptures , things that look big compared to the house from the road a hundred meters ,or two yards away, or from the ditch roads that skirt the Rio Grande; things for the land , that has been waiting millions of years for them; timing is everything, they say. Geometric jewels, but not necessarily art, because to me, the context is broader and somewhat other than art; these things that speak to me inside and shape themselves with(in) my mind and according to my abilities to bring them into being , but mostly according to what they already are, because I did not invent the ways that space divides with symmetry, or how nature operates the functions of geometry. Or, perhaps, my definition of art is broader than some , with nature being the ultimate artist. nature that not only somehow , mysteriously, uses mathematics and physics and chemistry – oh, and geometry !- to build, but even more mysteriously, invented those rules. I don’t do any of that ; I just poke around and see what I can find .

Anyhoo, what much of this obsession boils down to is a compulsion to experiment with relatively basic polyhedral geometry , and this began decades ago and has always been a smoldering force , usually overshadowed by ‘regular’ work , and life. Now, though, there is room in the yard for big ideas , big dreams , and the issue becomes what to put there, and the obsession has room to grow. back in the city , in the small place we lived in for 19 years, there was no room for anything big, and almost all of my wire sculptures had to be small . The biggest one is about 5 feet tall, and had to go on the roof , where it stood out largely. Now it’s hanging from a cottonwood tree right outside the house and it’s all but disappeared ; you literally have to know it’s there to see it. The Big One I’m working on now is (so far) made from one inch eletrical conduit (EMT, galvanized steel tubing : cheap, strong for it’s weight, and weather -resistant , a perfect structural material ) and it’s sort of like a giant cube 9 feet on a side, but is actually two tetrahedra (look up merkabah for some googly new age fun) . it will have hubs attached to it’s tips, and curved 5/16″ aluminum rods connected to the hubs, surrounding it like a giant tinkertoy set (with curved pieces) sphere . There will be a platform and hinged sides for privacy , and it will become a place to watch the stars , and something more perhaps, or just a yard sculpture .

What I’m especially tickled about is how this approach, of affixing the hubs onto the outer points or vertices of a large , rigid skeleton , is that it facilitates building my curved -wire sculptures on a grander scale. Long story shortened: taking straight-edged polyhedra and turning them into spherical , curved edge ones is asking an awful lot of straight-edged, flat-faced polyhedral geometry. There is tension in all directions that holds the figures together , but only if it’s balanced , and wrestling spherical balance into a set of tinkertoy hubs and straight wires is no mean feat even on a small scale. On a large, yard scale , it quickly becomes impossible and dangerous … unless (now that it occured to me, after 15 years) the hubs can be fixed in their final positions in space first . The unwieldiness of many unfixed hubs , many big rods in unbalanced tension , and the impossibility of assembling them all , large, by myself , was what kept the sculptures small .

One man’s dream is slowly taking shape, rising foot by foot into the clear sky … and now it’s back to dreaming for the sake of dreaming , about finding certain shapes that resonate –oh yes, some will even sing when struck– the right way and giving them form in the world. This is different … you can call it art but it’s more and less than art ; the geometry isn’t even very complex — relatively basic shapes are very powerful, while complex ones can get way too cluttered — and the motivation isn’t for anything but the results .much more attractive things are done with geometry by more dedicated artists and sculptors , so I am more like a (mad) scientist , an emprical technician , discovering what spatial gems are hidden within the obvious , not necessarily concerned with creating objects for others to find beauty in but always looking for what is beautiful to me. it’s probably always going to be a side interest anyway , for practical reasons, and there are reasons why I like it that way. There is no pressure , no reason to make anything other than exactly what I want to make, and going all the way into that and out the other side, allowing myself to make only what wants to be made through me , if I choose to look at it that way, and there are reasons I like looking at it that way.

Expansion … I love it… finding new space to grow into , new ideas from all the way out there, coming back full-circle and seeing the same everything from a new perspective, and finding new things in familiar places . how can I not love that, and how can I not love living long enough to see that things work that way?. This started in 8th grade , with the toothpick bridge contest, which I won by cheating (adding extra glue after my bridge was weighed) (or would it have won anyway ?) . What I liked was how pyramids and tetrahedrons were relatively easy to make and looked cool. Later , along with an early interest and budding career as a silversmith, I experimented with carboard models of various polyhedra , and made a few slick , hollow sheet metal ones http://s129.photobucket.com/albums/p219/sheltech/Sculptures/?action=view&current=3Octasplus2Tetras018.jpg .(hey, there’s a little “two tetrahedra” on the right!). Quite a bit later , around 1993 , I stumbled upon the basic concept that is polyhedra turned into shperes (and stars )http://s129.photobucket.com/albums/p219/sheltech/Sculptures/?action=view&current=newcube-smallplainandstellated017.jpg, and that whole development has been more a part of my personal spiritual journey than it has been about ‘art’. It is also art , if you want it to be , but like I said, it’s less , and more, than art in some ways. Whatever … the whole thing has come back around again to basic shapes -I don’t need to reinvent the geodesic dome – approached in new ways , and also it’s evolved into new shapes – some archetypal forms that haven’t seen the light of this world before they found me – facilitated by basic skills and methods I learned very early in my metalworking life . Some of these ideas mutate very slowly , over years , before something exactly perfect percolates out in the end , and this is maybe because of only working on them once in a while , or because I keep changing myself ,over the years, and what seems perfect also mutates ; some of both, no doubt, and maybe, just maybe , because I like to think about them almost as much as I like to make them.